Facebook Introduces 'Unlike' Button

By Nicholas Jackson

Users have been so busy complaining through Twitter and other venues about the most noticeable of recent changes made to Facebook -- the font size in the News Feed -- that they missed something else: the introduction of an Unlike button. It's not the Unlike button that you've been waiting for, though -- one that would allow you to silently sweep in and thumbs-down everything your friends have to say.

The new Unlike button appears when you "X" a story from your Feed that was placed there by a page that you follow. Now, in addition to marking the story as spam, hiding the individual story or hiding all future stories from that page in question, you also have the option to "Unlike Page." Unliking pages has always been an option -- you're not forever tied to that regrettable late-night endorsement -- but required many more steps in the past.

Giving users this option will force "Facebook wall posts [to] behave a little bit more like email, while raising the stakes on high-level message relevancy so audience members don't opt out," according to Clickz, a marketing news website. Once you get people to "Like" your page, the work isn't over: you have to keep them interested. It's likely that this new development will also help to reduce the number of posts appearing on your News Feed as marketers work to keep their products from appearing to be too spammy.